You mean that someone else is reading this? Thought that this thread was heading to the abyss at the bottom of page 3. Only jg and I seemed to be posting, but since jg's post were much of the same, thought it best to stop posting, however as long as jg continues, I guess I will respond to jg's even though jg continues to ignore, comment on or debate what I post.

In an impassioned speech, Felipe Calderon, the president of Mexico and the host of the international climate summit taking place in Cancun, called for the nations of the world to stop squabbling and to work as one to halt global warming.

NASA released its monthly global temperature data, revealing November was easily the hottest in the temperature record. The meteorological year December to November was also the hottest on record. Calendar year 2010 appears poised to be the hottest on record.
These records are especially impressive because were in the middle of a strong La Niña, which would normally cool off temperatures for a few months (relatively speaking), and weve been in the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Its just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, other than by sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

If November and December temperatures stay relatively warm, 2010 could capture the record for warmest year, an early analysis shows. This year has also been marked by extreme weather events.

Some climate scientists caution that any one year's worth of events is driven more by natural variability than by long-term warming triggered by the released of carbon dioxide from burning fossils fuel. But when 2010's extreme events are seen in that broader context, they appear to fit long-term patterns the climate models have generally projected for a climate system responding to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.

A range of studies have documented an increase in extreme heat events, a decrease in extreme cold events, and an increase in rainfall and snowfall intensity globally during the past 50 years, atmospheric scientist Gerald Meehl, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, told the House Energy and Environment subcommittee last month.

On the basis of physical principles alone, "we could expect to see just these kinds of changes in extremes in a warming climate," he testified.

Shorter growing season linked to warmer winters on 'the roof of the world'.
In many regions, climate change has advanced the timing of spring events, such as flowering or the unfolding of leaves. But the meadows and steppes of the Tibetan Plateau are bucking that trend plants are starting to bloom later in spring, making the growing season shorter. This change could threaten the livelihood of the thousands of nomads who survive by raising cattle on the plateau.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Reefs are the oceans canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us and will be of our making.

When J.E.N. Veron speaks, we all should listen.* Veron is the former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.* He is principal author of 8 monographs and more than 70 scientific articles on the taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, and the fossil record of corals. His books include the three-volume Corals of the World and A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End (2008).* His research has taken him to all the major coral reef regions of the world during 66 expeditions.

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Hasan Mahmud, Bangladeshs State Minister for Environment and Forests and a PhD environmental scientist, told Wonk Rooms Brad Johnson that the Republican view of the world was dangerously false:

According to our findings, and according to the reality what we are observing, what we are encountering, we are facing that is, we are struggling with the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh. There is salinity intrusion, increased natural calamities that is a symptom of desertification in the northern part of Bangladesh, there is more frequent and more devastating floods, and erratic rainfall. All of these are negative impacts of climate change. In Bangladesh, this is very much visible, and we are encountering and facing the problem. I dont know about the United States and how In Bangladesh, this is the reality.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

David Roses climate science writing shows he has not learned from previous mistakes
Articles in the Daily Mail show the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused David Roses catastrophic mistakes about Iraq.

In any case, Seife got it quite wrong and those reviewing the book didnt bother to spend even a few seconds online to get the facts straight.
Hmm.* I thought there was a word for when you believe something that isnt true but that you want to be true:

Although Seife never says so explicitly, the books title alludes to truthiness the Word of the Year in 2005, according to the American Dialect Society, which defined it as the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.
Yes, irony can be so ironic.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more. And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century. We are punching the climate beast and she aint happy about it!

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

That bold statement may seem like hyperbole, but there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible.

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes, provides some of the strongest evidence to date that a large-scale, pervasive, and, in some cases, rapid change in Earths climate system is underway. This paper highlights observations of 20th and 21st century glacier shrinkage in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mount Kilimanjaro. Ice cores retrieved from shrinking glaciers around the world confirm their continuous existence for periods ranging from hundreds of years to multiple millennia, suggesting that climatological conditions that dominate those regions today are different from those under which these ice fields originally accumulated and have been sustained. The current warming is therefore unusual when viewed from the millennial perspective provided by multiple lines of proxy evidence and the 160-year record of direct temperature measurements. Despite all this evidence, plus the well-documented continual increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, societies have taken little action to address this global-scale problem. Hence, the rate of global carbon dioxide emissions continues to accelerate. As a result of our inaction, we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Important new research led by NOAA scientists, Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions, finds:

Quote:

the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the dust bowl era and inexorable sea level rise

.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

2010 was the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries. Two leading groups of scientists say it was the warmest since records began in 1850; another suggests it was the second-warmest.

But the year that saw an unprecedented month-long heatwave in Russia will be followed by cooler global temperatures in 2011, say climate scientists monitoring sea temperatures in the Pacific that are thought to determine temperatures around the world.

The final ranking of 2010 will not become clear until November and December data are available in early 2011, but November global temperatures are similar to those observed in November 2005, suggesting 2010 is on track for near-record levels.

This decade also proved to be the hottest on record, with temperatures averaging 0.46C above the 1961-90 average, 0.03C above the 2000-09 mean and the highest value yet recorded for a 10-year period.

The Russian heatwave, which saw temperatures in Moscow nearly 15C above normal for a month, led to thousands of deaths as well as forest fires across a wide region. But the heatwave extended across the Middle East, and northern India, devastating harvests and leading to food shortages.

Previous temperature records tumbled in 17 countries including Russia, Ukraine, Finland, Chad, Kuwait, Burma, Sudan, Niger and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan had Asia's hottest-ever recorded day when the temperature in the abandoned city of Mohenjo-daro in Sindh province reached 53.5C.

The most extreme temperature anomalies in 2010 occurred across most of Canada and Greenland, where annual temperatures were 3C or more above normal, and across much of Africa and south Asia, where annual temperatures were 1-3C above normal.

Guinea, in west Africa, was the only country in the world to have recorded a record low temperature in 2010, but says the World Meteorological Organisation, below-normal temperatures were recorded in Siberia, parts of South America, interior Australia and the south-east United States.

Britain, Germany, France and Norway all had their coolest years since 1996 due mainly to below-normal temperatures during the winter.

This was also the year that CO2 levels in the atmosphere bounced back after a slight fall caused the previous year's recession in 2009.

Data will not be complete for several weeks, but according to monitoring stations in Hawaii and Norway, levels were on course to grow slightly on record 2008 levels.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Deep sediment cores retrieved from the Bering Sea floor indicate that the region was ice-free all year and biological productivity was high during the last major warm period in Earth's climate history.

Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present the new findings in a talk on December 13 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Ravelo and co-chief scientist Kozo Takahashi of Kyushu University, Japan, led a nine-week expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) to the Bering Sea last summer aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. The researchers drilled down 700 meters through rock and sludge to retrieve sediments deposited during the Pliocene Warm Period, 3.5 to 4.5 million years ago.

"Evidence from the Pliocene Warm Period is relevant to studies of current climate change because it was the last time in our Earth's history when global temperatures were higher than today," Ravelo said.

we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

This morning, MediaMatters released the bombshell e-mail sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.

As the Earth's climate continues to change at an accelerating rate, the juggling and magical thinking and outright hypocrisy of climate change deniers continues to accelerate as well. While there are many examples of the remarkable ability of deniers to hold onto mutually contradictory beliefs and ideas, here are four well-worn arguments regularly put forward by deniers in public forums despite the fact that they've all been debunked (over and over and over) by scientists:

Deniers claim that climate models are bad, but they're happy to rely on far less reliable economic models to argue against taking action: One of the classic arguments of climate deniers is that the multitude of climate models is bad. Yet at the very same time, they promote the conclusions of a couple of economic models that say that doing anything about climate change will bankrupt the global economy. In fact, climate models are far superior to economic models. Climate models are far more rigorously tested, far more firmly based in physical reality, and far more unanimous in their projections than the economic models that have been applied to the problem of climate change. Indeed, you can find one set of economic models that says that mitigating greenhouse gases will be relatively cheap and another set that say it will be extremely expensive. You cannot find a state-of-the-art climate model that says the climate won't change with growing greenhouse gas concentrations.......

Government action is anathema; the answer is let the free market work (oh, but we can't have markets for carbon):....

Deniers argue that comprehensive observational data on the world's changing climate are wrong, but then point to cold weather in this or that location to argue that the world cannot be warming:.....

Deniers seize on a few minor mistakes in the IPCC report to claim its overall conclusions are invalid; but then use massively flawed scientific arguments to dispute real climate science:....

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

(For 'warmists' read '99.9% of scientists in the fields of paleoclimatology, metereology, climate, environment and every single discipline of natural history, the Pentagon, NASA, The British Department of the Environment and the governments of every single industrialised nation on earth'. Warmists. )

The original number contacted was 10,157 and of those, 69% decided they didn’t want any part of it,

Because they could tell the questions were bullshit, asked by bullshitters, The Science and Public Policy Institute, who are a notorious and deeply irritating pressure group who exist to spread misinformation.

"Oh, well", they said. "We'll count the people who wanted no part of it as 'no' then," and added them to the denier column anyway:

Quote:

but they were the original target population. When the figure of 75 believers is set against that number, we get a mere 0.73% of the scientists they contacted who agreed with their loaded questions.

"And then we'll try and claim that 0.73% is a representative number for the scientific community", they said, and then jazzguru found a link on one of his stupid climate blogs and posted it here with no comment of any kind.

Because they could tell the questions were bullshit, asked by bullshitters, The Science and Public Policy Institute, who are a notorious and deeply irritating pressure group who exist to spread misinformation.

"Oh, well", they said. "We'll count the people who wanted no part of it as 'no' then," and added them to the denier column anyway:

"And then we'll try and claim that 0.73% is a representative number for the scientific community", they said, and then jazzguru found a link on one of his stupid climate blogs and posted it here with no comment of any kind.

LAME.

Surely you're not insinuating that the material that jg post is BS?

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain?

Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation? Now this would be a good case for Mythbusters.

The study, published today in journal Nature, conflicts with previous research, which suggested that Arctic temperatures are already on track to exceed the threshold required to trigger rapid, irreversible ice loss.

Researchers from Polar Bears International said sea ice in the Arctic, which polar bears use as a platform on which to hunt seals and breed, is unlikely to undergo a rapid and irreversible decline when temperatures rise beyond a certain threshold.

Fox News managing editor Bill Sammon was widely condemned yesterday for an email telling the networks staff not to report on even the most widely accepted scientific facts without immediately challenging them, as I reported here.

Quote:

The only ones defending Fox News are, predictably, the originators and repeaters of the very disinformation that FoxNews reporters are being ordered to repeat. The leading online disinformer, discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, actually went so far as to fabricate phony claims about the email in order to defend Fox News

Yesterday, he wrote (falsely) that it was a stolen email and illegally obtained on the basis of no facts whatsoever. In fact, as MediaMatters explained to CP, It was provided to us by a recipient. I think that was pretty obvious from the story and from the email itself, which was clearly sent to a great many people in FoxNews. It would be hard to imagine that no one on the distribution list thought the email was journalistically inappropriate.

So why would Watts make up such a libelous claim, one that is so transparently false and easily checked (notwithstanding the fact that it is his modus operandi)?

He was trying to make a bizarre and torturous equivalence between the massive hack of Climategate emails and Foxgate in order to try to smear Al Gore (and me). #FAIL

Lets move on to the more interesting, but still erroneous, critique from disinformers like Watts. They claim that Fox News is only following standard journalistic practices. First off, anyone who actually believes that FoxNews is following journalistic practices should read Howell Raines: Why has our profession helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?. Raines, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former NY Times executive editor, explains

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.

[Ailes] and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions whether on health-care reform or other issues they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting.

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

The Foxgate email sent to Media Matters did little more then confirm what everybody already knew about FoxNews.

But what of the claim that FoxNews in this particular case was just trying to bring fair and balanced coverage to the climate story? Recall that, as MediaMatters explained, the Foxgate e-mail was sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.

Sammon wrote we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

As Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, told TechNewsWorld:

His memo on climate change, by contrast, underscores what Fox has become: not a news organization, not even an honest opinion outlet, but a source of political propaganda. The real obligation of journalists is to help their audience understand that the scientific community is almost unanimous that the climate is changing, that human activity is a major cause and that voluminous amounts of data support that view.

For the record, the 2007 Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded its review of scientific literature and relevant observations:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level........

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined see Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier. In 2001, the IPCC consensus said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.* As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking 100 years ahead of schedule.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Long-awaited guidelines ordered by President Obama last year to prevent government research from being altered or suppressed for political purposes so the integrity of government scientists can be protected could be released as early as Friday.....

Quote:

"It's about letting scientists, like those who are here today, do their jobs free from manipulation or coercion and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient, especially when it's inconvenient," he said.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

AWorld Public Opinion (WPO) poll finds that a remarkable 60% of those who watched Fox News almost daily believe that Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring, whereas only 30% who never watch it believe that.* Only 25% of those who watch CNN almost daily hold that erroneous belief and only 14% who listen to NPR or PBS almost daily.

This is not terribly surprising given that, as we learned this week, as of last December, Fox News managing editor Bill Sammon has required reporters and producers that report on even the most unequivocal scientific facts about global warming to dispute those facts IMMEDIATELY.
Erroneous views turn out to be commonplace among regular Fox News viewers, as ThinkProgress explains:

Last week, World Public Opinion (WPO) released a poll exploring political information in a post-Citizens United national election and found that 90 percent of voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently.

Quote:

More troubling, the poll also found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign. WPO said that voter misinformation contained beliefs about current issues such as TARP, the Recovery Act, health care reform, the economy, and climate change that were at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

[JURIST] California's Air Resources Board on Thursday approved measures that will provide incentives to companies and factories that decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. The provisions are envisaged under Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32) and include a permit system in which companies are allotted a quota of greenhouse emissions. If a company does not use all of its quota, it can sell to a company that is going to exceed its quota. Companies that exceed their quota can purchase "offsets" from companies involved in activities that lessen greenhouse emissions, like forestry. The program is reportedly the first of this type in the country. Supporters of the bill in California say they felt compelled to enact AB 32 after Congress failed to approve greenhouse gas reduction legislation. They hope they other states will follow suit.

In June, the US Senate defeated a resolution aimed at limiting the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The US Supreme Court affirmed the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions under the Clear Air Act in its 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency. In its ruling, the court held that if the EPA could show a link between greenhouse gas emissions and public health and welfare, then the act gives it the power to regulate emissions. The EPA announced last December that it had found that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations," and that emissions from motor vehicles contribute to greenhouse gas pollution. The EPA first announced its proposed finding in April before undertaking a 60-day public comment period. Some have suggested that the EPA findings have allowed Congress to avoid the political fallout that could come from passing tough climate legislation. AB 32 was first signed into law by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.

At least California is doing something about AGW.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

The gradual recovery from 1800-1850 was approximately linear, the recovery (warming) rate was about 0.5°C/100 years. The same linear change continued from 1800-1850 to 2000...The recovery from the LIA is still continuing today... The view presented in this paper predicts the temperature increase in 2100 to be 0.5°C ± 0.2°C, rather than 4°C ±2.0°C predicted by the IPCC

Not even wrong refers to any statement, argument or explanation that is so at odds with reality that it is considered uncorrectable.
2 + 2 = 4* is correct
2 + 2 = 5 is wrong
2 + 2 =* § did not understand the question
(2 + 2)/ zebra * Fugue = global cooling is not even wrong

SOME SEASONAL HUMOR

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

For quite some time, I’ve harbored the suspicion that both the popular science and the political activity that create and sustain the belief in Global Warmingism are informed by a retrogressively pagan mindset.

It’s not just that the quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific “Gaia hypothesis” — the belief, taking its name from the pagan Greek goddess of the Earth, that the sum of the parts of the Earth’s ecosystems together make up a living thing — is popular in certain environmentalist circles.

No, the basis for my suspicion is, in large part, the irrational and superstitious way Global Warmingism proponents and adherents react to any kind of extreme weather as evidence that modern economic and scientific activity is making global temperatures unnaturally rise.

If it’s a drought, or a long spell of hot and dry weather, they think we must be doing something to nudge up the Earth’s thermostat. If it’s a nasty hurricane or a notably destructive line of tornados, it’s our fault for driving SUVs. If riverside communities get flooded, that’s also the result of global warming. And if we get an unusually harsh and lengthy winter, yes, that, too, is proof that the Earth is getting warmer.

The Global Warmingists have covered all their bases. No matter what the weather is like, it always turns out to be exactly the kind of weather we should expect if human activity were causing global temperatures to rise.

The natural sciences have terms for that kind of hypothesis. “Unfalsifiable” is one of them. “Unscientific” is another. An idea may be true, but if it is incapable of being “falsified” or proven wrong, then whatever else that idea is, it certainly isn’t science.

Another thing that feeds my suspicion that a pagan mindset informs Global Warmingism are the steady and consistent calls for sacrifice — even human sacrifice — to ward off the threatened catastrophes.

I’m not opposed to moderation and frugality, and we certainly should put aside our avaricious and materialistic ways. Sacrifice, too, is virtuous and meritorious, as long as it is voluntary and sincere.

But the Global Warmingists seem more intent on making others sacrifice than in making big, painful changes in their own lives (yes, Al Gore, I’m talking to you).

More to the point, I can’t help but suspect that these calls for sacrifice are, like the Gaia hypothesis, quasi-religious in nature, and at times plainly religious.

Like the pagans of old thought they could appease the angry gods or win their favor through sacrificing the things most dear to them — their livestock, and if that didn’t work, human beings, even their own children — so it appears that Global Warmingism demands that we sacrifice. And it’s not really sacrifice because it’s moral or sensible or good for us, but sacrifice to appease the offended ecosphere.

It’s the old, old thought process of: “Bad things are happening and we don’t know why. How can we stop these things? How do we control what we don’t understand? We must be to blame. We must do something, anything, to make amends.”

It doesn’t matter that our efforts don’t have any demonstrable connection to the problem, or that they don’t do a thing to improve our situation but instead cause even more harm. All that matters is that we do something, and the bigger and more painful it is the better.

And so it was that the United Nations, having figured out that it’s bad for propaganda to engage in handwringing over global warming during a Scandinavian behemoth of a blizzard (like they did last time), gathered this winter month in balmy Cancun, Mexico — and once again failed to reach a binding international agreement on which of us should sacrifice and how much.

They failed despite opening their meeting with (I kid you not) religious rites invoking the supernatural assistance of an ancient Mayan jaguar goddess.